The George Foreman Grill analogy (AV vs FPTP in extreme views)

For those of you that do not have the pleasure of owning a healthy grill, the concept is that you cook your food on a sloping hot plate. This means that as the food is cooked, all the fat and excess liquid is drained off the food (with mine it drains into a removable bowl).

The benefit of this is that you can buy and eat food that if cooked traditionally, would normally have nasty bits in it and be unhealthy, without those drawbacks.

To bring it back to politics, this is a perfect way of thinking about FPTP, AV and PR.

By filtering out the extreme vote, FPTP is effectively draining away the 'fat and nasty bits' leaving the most supported in place.

With PR, you 'eat the food' as it comes. You get the good bits, you get the nasty bits. Nothing has been changed from how it was given to you.

...then we come to AV.
AV also 'drains away the fat and lard' however, in the worst of both systems, it then poors it back on top of the 'healthy food'.

With AV you'll have the respectable parties courting the views of the extreme parties in order to try and gain the second preferences of their voters.

Unlike PR, you will not have good bits and bad bits represented, you'll just have goods bits with a layer of lard over it all.

FPTP may mean that not everyone's views are represented, but this is because those views do not represent a large enough proportion of the voters in that area. I do not see what is wrong with that in a democracy.

Much like finding the median can sometimes be a much better way of finding the average than the mean.

Vote No to AV for healthy politics (centuries without extremists)